Jan Peters joined the Max-Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics in 2007 as a Research Scientist and as Robot Learning Group Leader in the Department of Bernhard Schoelkopf. Before doing so, he completed a Ph.D. at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. There, Jan has been working with Stefan Schaal, Sethu Vijayakumar (now at U. Edinburgh, UK), and Firdaus Udwadia (Department of Mechanical Engineering). Chris Atkeson (Robotics Institute at CMU) and Gaurav Sukhatme also guided him to his thesis. Jan remains affiliated with the CLMC Lab as an adjunct researcher.

Before joining USC's Computer Science Ph.D. program and the CLMC Lab in Fall 2001, Jan Peters graduated from the University of Hagen in 2000 with a Diplom-Informatiker (German M.Sc. in Computer Science, focus on artificial intelligence) and from Munich University of Technology in 2001 with a Diplom-Ingenieur in Electrical Engineering (German M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering, majoring in automation & control). In 2000-2001, he spent two semesters as visiting student at National University of Singapore. In 2002, he completed a M.Sc. in Computer Science (focus on Machine Learning) and, in 2005, a M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering (Major: Nonlinear Dynamics & Control) both from USC. Jan Peters has been a visiting research student at the Department of Robotics at the German Aerospace Research Center in Germany, at Siemens Advanced Engineering in Singapore and at the Department of Humanoid Robotics and Computational Neuroscience at the Advanded Telecommunication Research (ATR) Center in Japan. Please see his curriculum vitae for more biographical information.

At the Max-Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics, Jan has setup the new RObot Learning Lab (RoLL) working with four terrific robot learning students: Duy Nguyen-Tuong, Jens Kober, Katharina Muelling and Oliver Kroemer. He has also hosted several excellent research interns/external students who have been collaborating with his lab: Gerhard Neumann (TU Graz), Hirotaka Hachiya (Tokyo Tech) and Marc Deisenroth (Cambridge Univ.).

As Jan Peters' research lies at the intersection between two fields, i.e., machine learning and robotics, he has always keen to bring members of both fields together. To do so, he has organized three NIPS workshops (Towards a New Reinforcement Learning!, Robotics Challenges for Machine Learning and Probabilistic Approaches for Robotics and Control), two R:SS Workshops (Learning for Locomotion and Bridging the gap between high-level discrete representations and low-level continuous behaviors), two IROS workshops (From motor to interaction learning in robots and Robotics Challenges for Machine Learning II), one ICRA workshop (Approaches to Sensorimotor Learning on Humanoid Robots) and one ECAI workshop (The 6th International Cognitive Robotics Workshop). His Co-Organizers included Pieter Abeel (U. Berkeley), Drew Bagnell (CMU), Dana Kulic (U. Waterloo), Jun Morimoto (ATR), Nick Roy (MIT), Stefan Schaal (USC), Olivier Sigaud (U.Paris 6), Russ Tedrake (MIT), Marc Toussaint (TU Berlin), Sethu Vijayakumar (U.Edingburgh), Gerhard Lakemeyer (RWTH Aachen, Germany), Yves Lespérance (York University, Canada), Fiora Pirri (University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy), Ales Ude (Josef Stefan Institute, Slovenia), Tamim Asfour (U.Karlsruhe).

In 2008, Nick Roy (MIT), Russ Tedrake (MIT), Jun Morimoto (ATR) and Jan Peters founded the IEEE Technical Committee on Robot Learning. In 2009, Jan Peters and Andrew Y. Ng (Stanford) have edited a Special Issue on Robot Learning in the Autonomous Robots journal. They received 46 submissions and only accepted the best 8 papers. It required altogether 180 reviews written by roughly 100 colleagues to achieve this excellent selection. More information on Jan Peters can be found on his MPI website.

In 2010, Jan Peters is Area Chair at Robotics: Science & Systems (R:SS), at the European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML), and at Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS).

Research Interests: Motor Control, Robotics, Machine Learning
Biographical Information: Please see his curriculum vitae.
Publications: For the complete list of his publication, see here.

Key References

1. Peters, J.;Schaal, S. (2008). Reinforcement learning of motor skills with policy gradients, Neural Networks, 21, 4, pp.682-97.
   [Keywords: Reinforcement learning, Policy gradient methods, Natural gradients, Natural Actor-Critic, Motor skills, Motor primitives] [PDF]
   
   

2. Peters, J.;Schaal, S. (2008). Natural actor critic, Neurocomputing, 71, 7-9, pp.1180-1190.
   [Keywords: reinforcement learning, policy gradient, natural actor-critic, natural gradients] [PDF]
   
   

3. Peters, J.;Schaal, S. (2007). Reinforcement learning by reward-weighted regression for operational space control, Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML2007).
   [Keywords: reinforcement learning, operational space control, weighted regression] [PDF]
   
   

4. Kober, J.; Peters, J. (invited submission). Policy Search for Motor Primitives in Robotics, Machine Learning Journal.
   
   

   Kober, J.; Peters, J. (2009). Policy Search for Motor Primitives in Robotics, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22 (NIPS 2008), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [PDF]
   
   

5. Peters, J.;Mistry, M.;Udwadia, F. E.;Nakanishi, J.;Schaal, S. (2008). A unifying methodology for robot control with redundant DOFs, Autonomous Robots, 24, 1, pp.1-12.
   [Keywords: operational space control, inverse control, dexterous manipulation, optimal control] [PDF]
   
   

6. Peters, J.;Schaal, S. (2008). Learning to control in operational space, International Journal of Robotics Research, 27, pp.197-212.
   [Keywords: operational space control, learning, EM ALGORITHM, redundancy resolution, reinforcement learning] [PDF]
   
   

7. Nakanishi, J.;Cory, R.;Mistry, M.;Peters, J.;Schaal, S. (2008). Operational space control: A theoretical and emprical comparison, International Journal of Robotics Research, 27, 6, pp.737-757.
   [Keywords: task space control, operational space control, redundancy resolution, humanoid robotics] [PDF]
   
   

Contact Information

Mail: Jan Peters, Spemannstr. 38, 72076 Tuebingen, Germany
Phone: +49-7071-601-585
Fax: +49-7071-601-552
Email: